Conrad Echos Hegel...Hegel...Hegel

On G.W.F. Hegel's
“The African Character”

Hegel’s general premise is that all African Negroes are incapable of comprehending any intangible higher power, and therefore lack respect for the immortal nature of humans.  He concludes this unusual disregard for their own lives--and those of others--exhibits itself in an undeveloped, wild state which includes love of slavery, physical violence, and cannibalism.  Hegel dismisses the African continent’s past and future (apart from the Europeanized sections) as having “no movement or development to exhibit” (212).

Seventy decades after Hegel’s sweeping assessment, Conrad echos similar sentiments in Heart of Darkness.  One judgment Hegel puts forth is that native Africans’ “consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence--as for example, God, or Law” (208).  Conrad has Marlow’s aunt speak of “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways” (12).  Hegel asserts “the Negro...exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state” and has no “thought of reverence and morality--all that we call feeling” (208).  He describes “magicians, who perform special ceremonies, with all sorts of gesticulations, dances, uproar, and shouting, and in the midst of this confusion commence their incantations” (209).  Painting a similar picture, Conrad’s Negroes “howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces” (36).  Ironically, Kurtz presided at “midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites,” with Africans worshipping him--a white human--since he “must necessarily appear to them (savages) in the nature of supernatural beings” (50).  In addition, it is Kurtz who exhibits the ultimate lack of reverence, morality, and respect for God, law, and human life by parading Negro skulls skewered on poles in front of his quarters (57).  In an explicit display lacking feeling, it is Marlow who callously tips his black helmsman’s body overboard, acknowledging his faithful aide as no more than “an instrument” (50).

Proclaiming blacks as obviously inferior to whites, Hegel proclaims Negroes have “nothing harmonious with humanity” (208).  In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz’s native followers are something less than human, attributed with “rudimentary souls”, while white pilgrims are said to have “small souls.”  Yet at least one of Kurtz’s devoted friends (presumably the white Marlow) possesses a soul “neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking” (50).

To illustrate his conclusion that blacks have no respect for self or others, Hegel asserts “Negroes indulge…(in) perfect contempt for humanity, which in its bearing on Justice and Morality is the fundamental characteristic of the race.”  Conrad points to such perceived contempt by describing Africans variously described only as “enemies, criminals...and rebels” (58).  Hegel declares that, among Africans, “tyranny is regarded as no wrong, and cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary and proper.”  Conrad describes a black native, reported to be a cannibal, as having “fierce nostrils,” “a flash of sharp teeth,” and wanting to eat an unseen human in the bush (40).  Yet, it is Kurtz who expresses ultimate tyranny--the cruelest, most oppressive, unreasonable, and arbitrary abuse of power--in his post-scripted advice to “exterminate the brutes!” (50).

Hegel concludes that Africans are “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit(s), still involved in the conditions of mere nature” (212).  Marlow mirrors this dismissive attitude, proclaiming Africa to be “so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness” (55).  Conrad supports Hegel’s view of blacks deserving little consideration when Marlow’s African helmsman is reduced to “a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara” (50).  (575 words)